Simon Hughes invites young social entrepreneurs to Parliament

Simon Hughes MP was so impressed with Walworth Academy's social enterprise project he has invited pupils to sell their wares at the House of Commons.

Earlier this month the Bermondsey & Old Southwark MP met BTEC Business Studies students at Walworth Academy and heard how they marketed, budgeted and made £124 profit after being trained by the charity MyBnk to sell ethical environmental friendly products in their community.

Mr Hughes saw how the Enterprise-in-a-Box project gave pupils a taste of the world of social enterprise by doing it for real with Kabloom Seedbombs, an urban guerrilla gardening product for brownfield sites.

The pupils gave a presentation about how they sold and told the story behind their goods, targeting teachers and fellow students after school and produced adverts and business plans that armed them with trading and soft skills.

Young people in the UK are currently three times more likely to be unemployed than adults and while more than half of the population would like to start their own business, less than 5 per cent actually do.

MyBnk is the UK's leading direct deliver of.

Since 2006 MyBnk has run financial education and enterprise programmes more than 60,000 young people in schools and youth groups.

"I would like to offer them the opportunity to sell their products to myself and my colleagues in the Houses of Parliament, it's a really great idea and I really want to encourage them to continue selling."

15-year-old Michael said: "It's important for people to be able to use these skills when they're older, it gives us a head-start for business and lets them know how money works.

"I really enjoyed how my team performed and sharing with that with our MP."

Business studies teacher Alicia Pennant said: "It's really good to bring MyBnk in for enterprise because it's different, we did it last year as well and it was really effective because MyBnk are so supportive of the school, they make the young people feel really comfortable and they interact well with them, the students here today are doing business studies so this will contribute to their unit 1 assignment and will lead them on to creating their own business plans which MyBnk sets the tone for."